The work of Reid, Chinburg-Hamilton-Long-Reid,
Prasad-Rapinchuk, and the author with Reid have demonstrated that
geodesics or totally geodesic submanifolds can sometimes be used to
determine the commensurability class of an arithmetic manifold. The
main results of this article show that generalizations of these
results to other arithmetic manifolds will require a wide range of
data. Specifically, we prove that certain incommensurable arithmetic
manifolds arising from the semisimple Lie groups of the form
$(\operatorname{SL}(d,\mathbf{R}))^r \times
(\operatorname{SL}(d,\mathbf{C}))^s$ have the same commensurability
classes of totally geodesic submanifolds coming from a fixed
field. This construction is algebraic and shows the failure of
determining, in general, a central simple algebra from subalgebras
over a fixed field. This, in turn, can be viewed in terms of forms of
$\operatorname{SL}_d$ and the failure of determining the form via certain classes of
algebraic subgroups.